Donald Trump's surprisingly successful presidential campaign accompanied by violence at campaign rallies and a general disregard for democratic norms are only the latest manifestation of this declining confidence. Trump would be impossible at a time or a place where democratic commitments were more robust and where the temptations of yielding to a strong leader who operates outside of the normal rules of the game were less pronounced.

Secondhand Souls provides comic relief and much needed laughter to break up the monotony of the every day grind. He writes about the "everyman," and Moore's everyman is anything but ordinary because of the expansive walls of his fictional worlds.

In honor of this NYPL all-star novel being turned into a film, the Library's manager of reader services Lynn Lobash has compiled a list of the top five psychological thrillers turned movies. So if you're in the mood to be freaked out and "Gone Girl" is checked out, try one of these on for size.

It may seem as though all the famous writers have full-time writing jobs to which boost their chances of their novels selling and hitting the bookshelves. However, by looking through the authors etched in literary history, this is far from the case.

It's an exercise in futility to try to hypothesize what effect antidepressants would have had on long-gone writers like Poe and Baudelaire. Whether you function or not is a more pertinent question than whether or not antidepressants or substance abuse "silences the soul."

Jazz-minh Moore is painting figures in landscapes, in acrylic paint, on birch panels. She often distresses the boundaries of her panels, or otherwise incorporates the physicality of her substrate into the work itself.

Every once in a while, a trailer will come along that gets to me. Such is the case with David Fincher's haunting two and a half minutes on Facebook. If I'm in a certain mood about my life, this trailer makes me overwhelmingly sad.